Monthly Archives: June 2009

DAC

Posted on June 30, 2009 by paulmcl

The design automation conference (DAC) is later this month in San Francisco. Trade shows in general are probably gradually dying. I doubt we’ll be going to them in ten years time. But rumors of their death are somewhat exaggerated. DAC … Continue reading →

Posted in eda industry | Comments Off

Licensed to bill

Posted on June 29, 2009 by paulmcl

As I’ve said before, in every sizeable EDA company that I’ve worked, a huge percentage, 30-50%, of all calls to the support hotline are to do with license keys. Why is this so complicated? Are EDA software engineers incompetent? Most … Continue reading →

Posted in finance, marketing | Comments Off

Friday puzzle: McNuggets

Posted on June 26, 2009 by paulmcl

Last week’s puzzle was to calculate the resistance between opposite corners of a cube of identical resistors. Let’s assume they are all 1Ω since it doesn’t really matter. The key insight with this and many such problems is to find … Continue reading →

Posted in puzzles | Comments Off

Cadence, Avant!, SPC and Mitch

Posted on June 26, 2009 by paulmcl

The big picture story of Cadence and Avant! is well known. Some Cadence employees left to create Avant! (initially called Arcsys) and stole Cadence source code. Cadence told the district attorney, Avant! was raided, and after several years delay, everyone … Continue reading →

Posted in silicon valley | Comments Off

Guest blog: Soha Hassoun

Posted on June 25, 2009 by paulmcl

DAC is coming up late July, as I’m sure you know. For the first time this year there is a real user track in which users, unmoderated by EDA marketing droids, can talk about their experiences. Soha Hassoun of Tufts … Continue reading →

Posted in guest blog | Comments Off

Patents

Posted on June 24, 2009 by paulmcl

Patent law is a controversial subject and keeps popping up unexpectedly (for instance Ron Wilson writes about a case at Applied Materials here). I talked about it here in the context of CDMA and Qualcomm. The basic “tradeoff” in having … Continue reading →

Posted in eda industry, management, semiconductor | Comments Off

Hiring and firing in startups

Posted on June 23, 2009 by paulmcl

Startups have unique problems in human resources. For a start, they don’t have human resource departments or even, in the earliest days, anyone to even do the mechanical stuff of making sure the right forms are filled out. You have … Continue reading →

Posted in management | Comments Off

More Moore: that iSuppli report

Posted on June 22, 2009 by paulmcl

The recent iSuppli report has been getting a lot of coverage (EDN, Wall Street Journal if you have a subscription). It somewhat predicts the end of Moore’s law. If you look at the graph you can see that no process … Continue reading →

Posted in semiconductor | Comments Off

Friday puzzle: cube

Posted on June 19, 2009 by paulmcl

Last week’s puzzle was the “two switch” puzzle. To solve it, the group of prisoners must identify one person, the counter. Ignore switch B, it is there just to give people something to toggle if they don’t want to toggle … Continue reading →

Posted in puzzles | Comments Off

Chicken and the egg

Posted on June 19, 2009 by paulmcl

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This question often gets posed as an example of a question that is impossible to answer, since plainly chickens come from eggs and eggs come from chickens. In EDA, there are chicken … Continue reading →

Posted in culture | Comments Off